"In every single sphere of British influence the upper echelons of power in 2013 are held overwhelmingly by the privately educated…." former Prime Minister Sir John Major has complained in a speech.

Well the solution is obvious and I'm surprised Major didn't spell it out. We need a cull – a major cull at every bank, barristers chambers, law firm, FTSE 100 corporation, accountancy firm, hedge fund, advertising agency, hospital trust, regiment and aircraft carrier in the land. Only around 7 per cent of Britain's schoolchildren are educated privately and this needs to be reflected, as a matter of urgency, in the composition of the senior staffing at our major institutions. Yes, indeed it may be true that the privately educated may, ceteris paribus, be more confident, self-disciplined,… Read More

This is a story with everything: bees, junk science, the French behaving badly, the EU at its worst… (H/T Richard North at EUreferendum).

You'll read it and go: "Yes! This is why I hate the EU. This is why it can never be reformed: because corruption and lies and horsetrading and an unaccountable bureaucracy of imperious apparatchiks and an inbuilt antipathy to business and free markets aren't unfortunate and rare byproducts of the system. They ARE the system."

• Tim Stanley: The squalor of student digs can take a terrible toll
Iain Martin: Dave needs to worry about Ukip
Daniel Hannan: Full time MPs? What a horrible thought

It follows on from something I wrote a few months ago about the campaign to ban neonicotinoids. I gave the piece the heading Bees, Pesticides and More Green… Read More

"Climate change" has become a "substitute religion" for people with a "nakedly political" agenda which has less to do with saving the planet than it does with reining in economic growth and wealth redistribution.

Well we knew this. But how how nice it is to hear it from the mouth of a statesman as distinguished as former Australian Prime Minister John Howard, whose blistering speech last night at the Global Warming Policy Foundation you can read in full here.

Howard's own record during the great climate change scare is not entirely unblemished. It was on his watch that Australia introduced its disastrous policy of declaring its trees a "carbon sink", thus effectively removing the property rights of farmers who could no longer legally clear their land for agriculture or, indeed, to create… Read More

"Well if we're catching flak from both sides we must be doing something right…"

How many times have you heard this defence from apologists for the BBC? It's not left-wing-biased: how could it possibly be when it so often gets complaints from left-wingers criticising its outrageous bias towards the right…?

Actually, I can think of lots of reasons why this proves absolutely nothing. It's a classic case of what I call the Hitler/Churchill fallacy – or, maybe more appropriately as far as the BBC is concerned the Mao/Stalin fallacy: the false idea that whenever you take two extreme positions the sensible, decent middle ground must lie at the median point between them.

Another reason it's problematic lies in the nature of political activism. It's an unfortunate fact of life that people of a … Read More

Hollywood blockbuster director James Cameron – best known for his movies Titanic and Dances With Smurfs – has announced his latest project. He is going to make the dumbest, lamest, most tendentious, hysterical, credibility-free and monumentally pointless series in the history of television. (H/T Ken Shock)

The series will be called Years Of Living Dangerously [it takes its name from a film called The Year of Living Dangerously, cunningly removing the definite article and then pluralising the first word] and will be based on the cataclysmic event that no one is talking about right now because it hasn't happened in 17 years and may not even happen again in our lifetime, more's the pity: global warming.

Here's the pitch:
YEARS of LIVING DANGEROUSLY is global warming like you’ve never seen it before. Coming to SHOWTIME in April, this multi-part television event tells the biggest story of our time: climate change and… Read More

To see why Sir Elton’s complaints about vapid new acts don’t stack up, just look at Lou Reed

Modern pop music is processed, “packaged crap”, says Sir Elton John. How fitting that he should have said it – at a private dinner at the Royal Academy of Music – in the week of the death of seemingly the least processed, packaged pop star of them all: cantankerous, difficult, wilfully obnoxious, painfully avant garde Lou Reed.

More on Telegraph Blogs:

• James Delingpole: The scary genius that was Lou Reed
• Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: China's impossible contradiction
• Dan Hodges: Drop the licence fee if you want to protect the Beeb

Not, of course, that Reed would ever have called himself a pop star. He built most of his career striving to avoid popularity, first by rejecting the dreamy, mellow psychedelia of late Sixties America in favour of the raw, visceral sound… Read More

Lou Reed, who is reported by Rolling Stone to have died aged 71, was the most terrifying rock star I have ever interviewed. Partly it was his look that was so unsettling: all those amphetamines in his rock n roll years had taken their toll. His sunken cheeks, intense staring eyes and perpetually macerating jaw gave him the look of a malevolent praying mantis in a poodle fright wig. Partly it was because he took especial delight in giving the journalists who came to see him as hard a time as possible – especially if, as I was, they were young, nervous and clearly out of their depth.

Before the interview I'd asked Tony Parsons to give me a steer on what I should be asking him. Parsons said the key thing was the… Read More

Very, very, VERY stupid, I'm guessing. And perhaps he's right. As part of his ongoing campaign to make the Conservatives more electable, he's inviting us to experience the biggest outbreak of collective amnesia since Odysseus and his crew visited the Land of the Lotus Eaters. He wants us to forget the huskies. And the melting glaciers. And Dave's announcement – from Greenpeace's HQ, no less – that he was going to lead "the greenest government ever". And to tell ourselves that all these unpopular wind and solar farms, all these rocketing energy prices have nothing whatsoever to do with husky-hugging Dave, leader of the greenest government ever, but with someone else entirely.